Self-indulgent meditation

Beyond Consolation

The hyperbole begins early. Referring on page 1 to the interview Nuala O’Faoláin gave to Marian Finucane shortly after Nuala was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the spring of 2008, the author describes it as “far more significant” than moon landings or the collapse of a government.

“No single event in Irish culture in my lifetime has quite equalled the impact of the interview,” writes Waters, best known as a columnist with the Irish Times. “No book I can think of, no painting, no movie, no speech, no television programme, no newspaper article, no poem or song, has touched the places this interview touched.”

! Let’s just mention the Good Friday Agreement, the television documentary States of Fear and the Ryan Report, and leave it at that. What draws Waters to the interview are O’Faoláin’s thoughts in articulo mortis on God and the possibility of an afterlife. This gives him a platform to construct a framework for his own ruminations on matters that go beyond our economic woes. And a ramshackle framework it turns out to be. This is two books in one. The autobiographical content and the childhood reminiscences are more of a distraction from what is a manifesto for theism.

The death of Ms O’Faoláin triggered a series of reflections on end-of-life issues, religion, the Catholic Church, the rise of what has come to be known as the New Atheism, clerical sex scandals, culture, God, the distortions of Irish Catholicism, Jesus Christ and the intellectual status of the man traditionally referred to as Christ’s vicar on earth, Pope Benedict XVI.

Waters is an unabashed admirer of the latter, describing him as “one of the world’s most progressive thinkers”, a man who possesses “a supreme intellect mounted in a most animated humanity”. Yet this is the same man who ruthlessly stamped out dissent, imposed silence on other theologians and operates on the basis of a very shrivelled concept of freedom of conscience and freedom of expression.

The approach of the author to the present state of Irish society (in terms of what he calls its spiritual dimension) is nothing if not idiosyncratic: he oscillates between different versions, depending on the trajectory of his argument. When it suits, we are told we are a people who share certain religion-based values; when it doesn’t, the author accuses us of having jettisoned these values. And he turns the acceptance of a central tenet of Christianity – the belief that death shall have no dominion over mankind – into a personal epiphany. When did he last read the Nicene Creed?

And nor is he kind to newspapers. He sides with the stance of Archbishop (as he then was) Seán Brady of Armagh, writing some years ago, who warned Catholics to review their purchase of “certain Sunday newspapers if these continued to ridicule or undermine religious belief”. But is it really true that “Irish journalism is deeply hostile to Catholicism”?

I should have thought the hostility, in the main, is directed at malignant manifestations of that same Catholicism, especially in the area of human sexuality. Indeed, later on the author himself feels compelled, having focused on the “mutant version of Catholicism”, to declare that “in many ways, the church is beyond defending”.

As someone who writes regularly and critically about Catholicism in Ireland, I have never yet felt the need to be quite so hostile or so totally dismissive of the church (consisting in essence of Christ and the “people of God”, not the hierarchy).

The central precept of Waters’ thesis is contained in a three-word statement on page 217: “Faith is knowledge”. More of an assertion actually than a statement, but just how is faith “knowledge”? The reality is that faith is a conscious decision to commit oneself to a belief in something for which there is no external evidence. That’s why it’s often referred to as a “leap in the dark”.

In our culture the question of faith usually arises in relation to the God hypothesis. Yes, I agree with Waters insofar as that leap is as real – and uncertain – for the atheist as for the theist. But no matter how intense one’s faith, either in the existence or non-existence of God, the “knowledge” one way or the other doesn’t match our everyday understanding of knowledge.

Waters, like Benedict XVI and millions of others across the globe, chooses God. All very proper, but at best this choice never gets any better, is never more than, a “wager”, in Pascal’s famous formulation; faith is always faith, not intellectual certitude. Like his hero, Pope Benedict, Waters seems incapable of recognising that it is a form of arrogance to seek to make belief in God normative for all as an indispensable basis for hope or happiness.